The Press: Uproar in Haiti

Staffers on Haiti's 50-odd newspapers like to quote Petrarch and
Thucydides, compose sonnets and write essays on existentialism, but
they rarely get around to covering the news. When they do, their
reports are usually sketchy, partisan, filled with slander,
vituperation and undocumented sensation.

When a United Nations committee criticized the Haitian press last year
as one of the worst trained in the hemisphere, President Dumarsais
Estimé decided that it was high time for Haiti to start learning its
journalistic ABCs. He summoned blonde, blue-eyed Edith Efron, 27, a
graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and an ex-newshen (the
Lawton (Okla.) Constitution,...